Karsten Harries
The Bavarian Rococo Church: Between Faith and Aestheticism.
Yale University Press, 1983. 0300027206 xv/282 pages.
Large-format volume, measuring approximately 9" x 11.5", is bound in gilt-lettered quarter gray cloth and marbled gray paper-covered boards, with purple ornamental design along spine edges. Book is new. Dust jacket shows light shelfwear, with sunning to spine panel and small closed tears at edges. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"The eighteenth century marked the emergence of a distinctly modern, aesthetic approach to art; formerly in the service of religion, morality, or society, art became 
"art for art's sake," beauty divorced from truth. A vide and noteworthy example of this transformation is the evolution and eventual disintegration of the Bavarian rococo church. Rooted in religious symbolism, the rococo church and its "rocaille' ornmentation eventually took decorative art to its ultimate expression -- an autonomous abstract art that, in separating itself from its subservient fucton, led to the death of ornament and signaled the end of the traditional approach to architecture and art.
Through careful examination and beautiful illustrations of a wide variety of well- and little-known Bavarian churches, Karsten Harries acquaints us with those features of the Bavarian rococo church that determine its particular style and set it apart from or relate it to the French rococo and the Italian baroque. He notes its creative and exuberant appropriation of French "rocaille"; its frames and frescoes, indirect lighting and diaphanous walls; its temporal and spatial dimensions; its playful adaptation of the sacred theatre of the baroque; and its function as a symbol of the Virgin Mary. Not content to show us churches such as Steinhausen, Diessen, Osterhofen, or Die Wies merely as works of art, Harries places them within the history of religion, elaborating as well on the social, political, and economic conditions that fostered their development."